Cruce Saunders
Hello Towards a Smarter World listeners! This is your host Cruce Saunders, and today we have some bonus content for you! Recently I was a guest on the Aprimo: Marketing Cheat Codes podcast - it was a great conversation with
Ed Breault – We discussed the radical impact of Standardization and Orchestion on
content operations.
What does it mean and what does it look like for teams and customers when content works well together?
Find out!
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Ed Breault
so what does your, when you work with clients, when you work with brands, you work with some amazing brands, what does your approach look like?
Where do you start with your brand patients, so to speak, and get to understand their, you know, the diagnostics, if you will, what their objectives are, what does your message look like?
Cruce Saunders
Well, usually we start at some level with the customer journey, because we're working to serve customer needs at the end of the day. We don't want to work on content plumbing without understanding what is the fountain we want to create at the end of the plumbing, right? So, we really kind of want to build an understanding of what are the experiences that the organization is working toward today.
You know, what's the actual shippable production environment today? What, what do those experiences need to look like in the future, right? And so for a lot of organizations, they're moving towards something. Personalization, some form of composability, which is essentially I need all my departments to be able to create things on the fly. I can't wait for IT to kind of work through the process of shipping a webpage, right?
Like I need to I need to have components that are reusable and remixable by my departments, right? And or they're moving towards some kind of intelligent experience for customers, which means, you know, like, hey, like I'm a medical device company and now I want the, the based on a blood test, I want, you know, an immediate set of content to help that patient through the next steps in their process.
Or I'm a fintech company and I want somebody to be able to call up and us to know that they're on step five of, of eight in a chargeback process and pick them up right there and help them complete because of how we're interacting between call center and web and mobile. And so all of that, that symphony of outcomes is kind of the basis.
And then we work back to the patterns, and we try to understand what are the content models and what are the semantic models that support those experiences. So, what are the words like the taxonomies and how those need to get tagged across our assets and what are the content structures that support these experiences? And then we help our clients really develop a set of sheet music that all their teams can work against.
And then in some cases, we actually build those orchestration functions with the client.
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Cruce Saunders
That's how we traet content today. And so, the cheat code is, hey, look, I need to be able to get electricity working across the city. We're going to set up a standard for how electricity works, right? And we're going to set a standard for what plugs look like and how they interoperate.
And then we're going to set up some kind of regulation so that, you know, we don't blow up houses and burn down burn down playgrounds and stuff. We need we need to make sure that we're interoperating and it's safe, so there's some kind of standard process for it. So, content models are basically like, what are the rules of the road for how our content is going to work between our CMS and our PIM and our product information management system and our E-commerce system and our watch and our chat bot, and can we get those all mapped so that they can actually function together and can we provide a little bit of orchestration so that it's not just the individual departments making it up, but they have the ability to kind of, you know, do their own thing out of the pieces and the parts that we all agree to share. So, we want to empower the creators, but we also want to make sure that the parts they're creating are able to work together across the technology.
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Cruce Saunders
we need to look at this thing as a portfolio and start to orchestrate it. We need it to not be broken in all these places and everybody doing their own ad hoc thing, right, it becomes an ad hocracy.
And so instead of an ad hocracy, we really want an orchestration, right? So that's what we're working towards is finding those sponsors who can actually affect portfolio level change.
Ed Breault
Yeah, you need it at the portfolio level, which is what you're saying in order to go. But then like the business case for change, I'm sure you get brought in on the we know we've got a problem, we know we've got 15 different types of electricity that's being created here. We need to get to a standard that the business case in order to initiate the change to get it to be portfolio level, what are some of the, I'll call it, you know, the strategic relevance of the change and or the impactful business metric movers that has the potential for an organization to get chartered at the level for it to work.
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Don’t miss the full episode! Follow the link in the episode description to listen in. And until we meet again, take one step at a time towards a smarter world.